1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a lane marker recognizing apparatus, a vehicle, and a lane marker recognizing program having a function of recognizing stud-type lane markers discretely provided on a road.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is known a lane marker recognizing apparatus which recognizes lane markers for dividing a traffic lane provided on a road on the basis of an image data acquired by an in-vehicle camera which captures an image of the road ahead of the vehicle. As the lane markers provided on the road, there are used linear lane markers such as lane boundary lines (white lines) and stud-type lane markers which are discretely provided such as Botts Dots (Nonretroreflective Raised Pavement Marker) or cat's eyes (Retroreflective Raised Pavement Marker).
Note that the linear lane markers can be detected by a straight line extraction technique such as a Hough transform while the stud-type lane markers cannot be detected by the straight line extraction technique. Therefore, there has been suggested a lane marker recognizing apparatus capable of detecting stud-type lane markers by using a pattern matching technique (for example, refer to Japanese Laid-Open No. 2003-317106).
The use of the pattern matching technique, however, has a problem in that when there are objects of a shape similar to the reference shape for pattern matching exists on the road, there is a fear that the same is falsely recognized as the image portion of the lane marker.